Age: 22
Gender: Male
Race: Deep Human
Class: Myrmidon, if you want to be exact about it. Feng specializes in combat with sharp, pointy objects of greater than a foot in length, though heāll be the first to tell you that in the right hands, anything is a weapon. Heās fast, unnaturally so, and far too quiet, mostly because he wears only the lightest of armors, sacrificing protection for mobility.
The tenets of his class demand smooth, fluid movements across a battlefield, constant awareness of oneās surroundings, and efficiency. Enemies are not often toyed with, though the level of creativity involved in their dispatching is only limited by the mind generating the ideas. An acrobatic agility serves him well, and though such a person will not bowl over large hordes of the opposition, they can and will cut swaths in themā¦ provided they have the skill, of course.
Physical Description:
Credit
Though he was raised without the finer things in life, he seems to have acquired a taste for them, if his wardrobe is anything to go by, anyway. He is most often strangely-dressed, the silks and rich colors more reminiscent of lamia and deep human nobility than anything else, the garments themselves acquired through less-than-honest means. When on the field of battle, heās a bit more practical, of course, and the Children are all rather uniform in raiment, so white it must be. His footwear consists of wooden sandals, fashioned so that they are basically straight , thin platforms of wood which stand on two smaller slats. At first glance, they seem both uncomfortable and difficult to balance in, but Feng doesnāt spare it a second thought.
His face still retains a good dose of childish roundness, though his jaw has squared off a bit. Eyes on the ochre side of brown generally have a flat look to them, as though he werenāt able to focus properly on the things in front of him. One of them is bisected by an obvious scar, where apparently a jagged claw was raked across his face. Even the eyelid has the mark, though the eye beneath seems oddly undamaged. His other one sports a white tattoo, which doesnāt seem to be of anything in particular.
Feng is built leanly, and stands none too tall at around 5ā9,ā attributable largely to his heritage. Wouldnāt want to go around bumping oneās head on cave ceilings, after all.
Personality
Feng isā¦ unusual. The phrase ānot all thereā seems to be a common way to put it, and perhaps itās as accurate as anything else would be. Unless heās been told itās time to start killing things, heās also entirely harmless, and disinclined to start trouble with anyone.
His absentminded demeanor is an external sign of what makes him extraordinary: his mind seems to be hardwired differently from most of them, and this has both benefits and drawbacks. His pain receptors, for example, trigger adrenaline when activated, which isnāt all that strange, but they do not induce fear, panic, or even the instinct for avoidance of future pain. So, cut him with a sword and heāll feel it, but he wonāt see any reason to care. At all. Ever.
While he experiences the standard range of human emotion, his unique chemistry makes his reaction to just about anything completely unpredictable. He might carry on a perfectly normal (wellā¦ normal for him) conversation with someone he has every intention of killing someday, or studiously avoid someone he rather likes, because his own bizarre trains of thought have led him to believe these are the appropriate things to do. He rarely remembers names, even if theyāve been told to him scores of times, and sometimes he forgets even simpler things, like what he was doing five seconds ago.
To a psionicist, his mind is largely incomprehensible. It has a surface much like glass. Smooth, reflective, and with nothing to latch onto. Beneath this are seemingly random swirls and eddies of thought that only barely touch upon the relevant, and searching around for his most painful hangups is likely to yield his storied internal debate over whether or not potatoes or yams are the most favorable starch. So while he has almost nothing in the way of mental fortifications, he doesnāt need them, because his mind itself is so strange as to be infuriating, and itās rather useless to try torturing him for information, either, given his unconventional reactions to just about everything.
Of course, all of this makes ordinary function something of a problem, and sometimes he forgets to eat or that he was supposed to go see someone about something. He mostly remembers the important things, but sometimes only just, and if someone makes enough of an impression on him, everything but their name will stick. For this reason, he often refers to people by monikers that are descriptive rather than nominative. For all intents and purposes, the only thing heās good at is fighting. Everything else is just sort of a haze in between battles.
During an actual fight, he seems to gain a bit more in the way of mental acuity, though it would be a mistake to equate this with strategy as traditionally conceived. Feng is often placed on a field with the express purpose of finding and killing officers or other important folk, sowing chaos in his wake. Truly, any strong opponent will do, but he has little taste for killing ordinary footsoldiers. The surest way to distract him from his damaging purpose is to present him with a sufficient challenge, at which point he is likely to ignore all earlier directives and focus on matters at hand.
Faction: Children of Fire. According to Feng, he owes his allegiance to āthe burning oneā which most people have interpreted to mean Nihalistrix.
Moral Alignment: If he can be said to have an alignment at all (and thatās a big āifā) it would most likely be true neutral.
Starting Armor: Over the white robes of the Children of Fire, Feng wears a red brigandine reinforced with dozens of small mirror plates. The overall protection is durable, especially against arrows, but light. He also keeps bracers underneath the flowing sleeves of the robes. His trousers are gathered at the ankles, looser about the thighs, and overlaid with shin guards.
Starting Weaponry: For Feng, battle is a lifestyle, and basically anything a weapon, from his bare hands to tree branches to chairs to pottery. That said, he prefers to keep things simple, and fights most often with his liuyedao, a moderately curved, single-edged sword that may have been the only thing his mother left behind.
Fighting Style: Up close and personal. Heās absolute rubbish with anything ranged, and has displayed no magical or psionic talent that anyone is aware of, including himself. Which makes the fact that he frolics around on a battlefield with little armor and survives something of a mystery.
Itās easily-enough solved, though why it is heās faster than any of his Children brethren is as much a perplexity as the original question. Certain psionics users are able to make themselves stronger and quicker in the same way he is, but tests have confirmed that it isnāt psionics and it isnāt magic. The last healer to take a look at him threw up her arms and declared that he must just be a lucky idiot. Feng isnāt sure, either, but unlike everyone else, he seems to know better than to look a gift horse in the mouth. He also has the traditional augments that a Child gets, including yet more strength, resilience, and the handy ability to breathe fire at will.
His martial training emphasizes fluidity, agility, and precision, appearing effortless even though a definitive amount of effort must be exerted to do any of it. Any fool can learn to swing a sword; Feng has learned how. Angles are important, as are considerations of the opponentās armor, positioning, and style. Versatility and flexibility will save you more often than a tower shield, and so he embraces the former while eschewing cumbersome methods of defense.
Weapon of Choice: His liuyedao, or, barring that, his hands and anything he can get them on.
Other: Feng carries those things necessary to keep his sword and armor in good condition, some water, and a bit of food. Thatās it.
History: Lian Tao was, many years ago, a relatively little-known captain in the ranks of the Civil army. Deep human by descent, she practiced a graceful, but pragmatic style of martial arts that made her a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield and her squad one of the most successful in the war. An ambitious, cunning woman, she recognized the coming of the dragons as an opportunity to get one up on those who would resist and secure her allies a place in the future of Norr. She and her entire battalion defected and joined with the Dragon Lords.
It was at some point in the nebulous middle of these two stretches of her life that Lian, never particularly free with her affections, nevertheless ended up expecting a child and unmarried. Never one to let events rule her, she rejected the further affections of the childās father and went into seclusion for a while, during which itās largely unknown exactly where she was or what she was doing. Five years later, she returned to the service of the dragons, little boy in tow.
For the rest of her too-short life, the only thing the woman placed above her work with the Children of Fire was the tutelage of her son, whose quixotic mannerisms she embraced, knowing how useful it would be for him to be able to deflect most forms of psychic interference. As parents do to children in such times, she taught him of her skills, and was pleased when he took to them well.
She died in an early engagement with the Legion of Ashes, though not before taking a good fifty men with her, or so the story goes. Feng, a teenager at the time, did not take his motherās death very well, or at least he didnāt seem to, appearing very agitated for a period of several weeks and making a habit of leaving those that came into his company with grievous bodily injuries. Though not until that time a combatant himself, he had been following military camps all his life, trailing behind with the whores and wives and younglings. He fought with the Children from then on, taking his own vows as one of them at the rather tender age of fourteen.